


Marra Tivvit

by mayhap



Category: Possession - A. S. Byatt
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene, Sickfic, gratuitous extension of a metaphysical conceit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:48:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28134948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayhap/pseuds/mayhap
Summary: “Now was he hers, if she should ask of himBody or soul, he would have offered all.And seeing this, at last, the Fairy smiled.”—Christabel LaMotte,The Fairy Melusine
Relationships: Randolph Henry Ash/Christabel LaMotte
Comments: 16
Kudos: 23
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Marra Tivvit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Claire_cz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Claire_cz/gifts).



On one of their scarce shared mornings, Christabel woke with a sore throat. Her voice was transformed into a painful rasp, like a witch in a tale, and Randolph, still curled companionably in their quilts, was dismayed.

“My dear, are you unwell?”

“My throat aches so,” she said miserably. “I knew that I should suffer, but I did not think that it should be so—so _prosaic_ , when it struck. I am sure that the catarrh will follow, with all its misery, and everything is spoilt.”

He examined her face, so new and so familiar to him. That she was pale, near white, was no clue to the state of her health, for this was her habitual hue. Her bright flaxen hair, tumbling down her shoulders in vegetative waves, seemed to lack none of its accustomed lustre. He thought that perhaps he spied traces of red lingering about her clear green eyes, and he wondered if she had wept, this time without waking him, alone on the bed which they shared. This possibility filled him with an almost unbearable tenderness.

“Nothing is spoilt,” he said, quite briskly. “I shall fetch whatever remedy you require, if it be the _Elixer Vitae_ itself.”

“I believe it has eluded the alchemists thus far,” she demurred, summoning a wan shadow of her usual wit.

“Then I’ll apply to some kindly local spirit for a cure, as that good Hob whose Hole we visited takes away whooping cough,” he continued. “I think they will not refuse me when I tell them that I am asking on your behalf, as they will know you for their kin.”

“Perhaps you might apply to our good landlady for a tisane.”

“But of course.” Randolph rose at once from the comfortable bed, chagrined. He girded his loins with his dressing gown. “How remiss I have been, to neglect this more practical magic while proffering airy nothings. What herb would be most efficacious, do you think?”

“Horehound is most beneficial to the throat,” Christabel croaked. “Though the Blessed Virgin wept to find it among the manger herbs, and would have pulled it out, but it was inextricable.”

“Oh?” he said. He was not familiar with this bit of lore, and a part of his brain reflexively sought to flesh out the scene: the young mother’s hand, the tangled roots, the herbal freshness contrasting with the animal ordure. Few of these subjects were seriously contemplated as candidates for poems, much less drafted and published, and yet he did see them. “Why did it make her weep?”

“It foretells sorrow.”

“It ought to foretell relief,” he said, with forced lightness, for he did not wish to borrow any of the future’s sorrow, “at least to one with an aching throat.”

“Oh, I hope so.”

Randolph insisted on preparing the tisane himself, though the redoubtable Mrs Cammish, feeling quite vindicated in her concerns for his lady’s health, would have done it and much more besides. The dry leaves stirred to a second life with the application of boiling water from the kettle, releasing a distinctive fragrance, rich and bitter. He wanted to be the one to do this for her, wanted to be the only one to minister to her, jealous of his rivals, few though they numbered in her life of such seclusion.

He was not unaware that this impulse was not wholly congruous with her desire—which he had repeatedly assured her that he shared—that she be utterly independent and self-possessed. The egg of the riddle which she had presented to him was smooth and entire, not admitting of so much as a keyhole through which a knight might foreswear himself. He believed, or wanted to believe, that he could square this circle with Donne’s ‘stiff twin compasses’: she possessed _him_ as well as herself, and so he might dart about her attentively, adjusting her pillows, refreshing her tisane, bathing her brow with a damp handkerchief, et cetera, without in any way jeopardizing her self-sufficiency.

“I am quite well situated now,” she said, as he attempted to adjust her pillows again, although they were not much altered from his previous adjustments. “You may go.”

“If I may go, then I may also stay,” he returned anxiously, “which I shall, my dear, unless you bid me otherwise. I hope that I am not making your head ache.”

“No,” she said, after turning it to one side and considering. “No, I think I am spared that much, at least. I feel none of the omens of its approach.”

“I am glad to hear it.”

“But I must not keep you shut up in here the whole day long,” she protested. “It is not what you have come for. You ought to be out, collecting more specimens and sights and stories.”

“And words,” he added.

“Yes, and words, those good, sturdy Yorkshire words,” she agreed. “They are all the raw materials you will need for your work.”

“And yours.” He took up her hand, thrilling at the returning press of her fingers as he thrilled at the ink of her pen on the page. “I need nothing else, so long as I am with you.”

She regarded him quite gravely. “I fear that you build unwisely, on shifting sand rather than on rock,” she said. “What will happen when the rains come?”

“But even the solid rock is involved in a continuous process of motion, as Lyell shows us,” said he, for _Principles of Geology_ had not failed to absorb him on the train, in spite of his distractions. “All our foundations are shifting ones, in a sense. There are no others.”

This was a sensitive point between them, and they both spoke around it now, rather than probe it directly, thoroughly. He knew that she wished he would find his way back to a more fixed orthodoxy, but he could not help being drawn to the visionary scope of continual change, even when it led him to doubts. At the same time, he could not find himself in sympathy with the practice of spiritualism, which she took as quite a new revelation, if not a New Testament. There might be comfort for some in the press of ghostly hands, but none for him. In this, they ran so obliquely that the compass itself was strained.

“Still, you must write,” Christabel urged him. “What will you say in your letters, if you have done nothing all day?”

His letters. They were the thing nearest fiction that he had ever written, for his poetry was all truth, although those truths might be imagined and even fantastic. The letters had many truths in them, but they were founded on a great, central lie, an absent presence. She was always there before him as he constructed these pleasant fictions, and when he had put his name to the page, they came to this bed together, having bought another night with a story.

“But it is not necessary to do nothing,” he said. “We have already collected so many specimens that our rooms are half-full, much as your notebooks are. I have several more fine anemones I might anatomize today, if you like.”

“Of course.”

She had taken readily to the practice, with a steady hand and an unflinching eye. Together they had followed in Swammerdam’s footsteps, probed with scalpels beneath microscopes to find hearts, stomachs, ovaries, all lying concealed within. She was, if anything, more ruthless than he with the knife.

“Then we need not stir until you are well.”

“I feel much better already,” she said. She had drained her second cup, and he realized that she sounded much nearer herself when she spoke. “Perhaps it is the force of your tisanes, or perhaps you have incurred a debt to whatever kindly local spirit has granted your wish.”

“Whatever it is, I’ll pay it with pleasure,” he said, extravagant in his relief.

“Oh yes,” said Christabel. “We shall pay. As we must. It cannot be otherwise.”

**Author's Note:**

> ‘marra tivvit’ (or ‘marrow tiv it’): Yorkshire dialect for ‘the other one of a pair’ or ‘two of a kind’


End file.
